


Hold your breath and close your eyes; (they aren't real if you do not touch them.)

by Othalla



Category: A Song of Ice and Fire & Related Fandoms, A Song of Ice and Fire - George R. R. Martin, Game of Thrones (TV)
Genre: Canon Compliant, Except Ned Sees Dead People, Gen
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-02-28
Updated: 2016-02-28
Packaged: 2018-05-23 20:32:03
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,523
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/6129160
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Othalla/pseuds/Othalla
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Ned will die never having seen a White Walker in the flesh.<br/>(He sees other things, though. Each and every day.)</p>
            </blockquote>





	Hold your breath and close your eyes; (they aren't real if you do not touch them.)

**Author's Note:**

> In normal fashion, I wrote the last four paragraphs first. Because that was the bit that I wanted to tell and that had to get out.  
> The rest was just a means to an end.

Before, he didn’t see them. Was just like everyone else – unknowing, ignorant, blissed.

But war happens and Lyanna dies and Dragons mourn into the sky and things are taken apart and put back together wrong. Ned leaves some things behind and comes back with some other things, the tale of war and the place in between twice over.

He leaves himself, maybe, on the faraway sands where the wind itself is hot. Ned’s not altogether sure.

(He comes back with Lyanna. Lyanna and the not wolf in sheep’s clothing.)

The Gates loom closed when Ned returns and there are omens there that Ned can’t discern. A young Lordling he is, scars on his hands and tears in his coat or not, privilege runs deep and sets root in the smallest of crevices.

But he learns. By Gods he learns.

Opens up the Jaws of Death and invites that which lingers in.

(He freezes in place like the frost has taken him and is forever grateful that the cheers around him deafens out everything.)

He looks away. Bends his neck and gathers his wife and son in his arms and pretends he isn’t cold and shivering.

They retreat to the Hall and the drinks flow like a river. Ned probably sticks his head in too deep, his eyes misty and his laughter coming easy and his wife smiles at him still and he soaks that in too because he’s going to ruin it soon.

Lyanna leans in over his shoulder, her hair falling down his back as she kisses his cheek and stains it red with her lips.

(The smell of burning flesh is in his nostrils and his brother’s face is bloated, Ned hardly touches his food.)

The not wolf is a silent babe, he’s only screamed the once and cried the twice as far as Ned’s aware.

The once and the first when Lyanna died and didn’t move on, lingering by her bed and cooing at the newborn child that still doesn’t look like he can breathe fire. The second when he shows him to his wife and tells her of what he’s done and how many children he has and knows in his heart that it isn’t still the lie it was.

She grows still and Robb screams against her chest and the not wolf cries along in his crib.

(Lyanna laughs, high and mad.)

His wife isn’t Cat yet and she won’t be for years to come. She’s Catelyn – Tully to the bone and Southerner to the soul and Proud to the death. He sullies her name, knowingly and with little sorrow. She’s not Cat yet and she’s his brother’s wife more than his, mother of his eldest or not, still a stranger in his bed and a stranger in his house and a stranger in his land. She doesn’t believe in the Old Gods and the Wall isn’t there for a reason.

She turns her back.

Family first.

(Benjen sees and Benjen goes and the Blind Man weeps.)

Dark and no lilac yet and Ned thanks the Old Gods with his life, devotion to the cause and men for the Wall – the least he can do. Maybe there isn’t just a wolf but maybe there isn’t just a not wolf either, the North welcomes still and the woods sings and the snow falls and all isn’t well  but all isn’t not either.

Many parts to a life.

Warring states of being and the chance is not to be taken so meet your Brother not wolf and learn to love for him live for him die for him and all shall be well.

(Lyanna screams at him when he’s asleep and she screams at him when he’s awake and sometimes winning is a matter of perspective.)

People grow up and grow old and die but no one ever leaves. Ned watches his sons gain sisters and brothers, Cat’s stomach growing thick with child time and time again and every time he fears for her a bit more. But she lives and the babes do too, and Winterfell is full enough of life that it almost offsets the dead.

He teaches his oldest together because where Robb goes Jon is never late to follow. Ned encourages it even as Cat’s lips strain disapprovingly and her hands grow harsh and cold at night.

If Jon cares for his brother more than himself than maybe the Realm won’t go under because he was selfish.

(Benjen never told him that the selfishness came from both parents but Ned has never needed him to.)

The courtyard full of people and shadows and Ned’s face is testament of things that have been are now will be. It’s not the fat on his stomach or the tiredness of his limbs that tells his age; he wrinkles fast, skin older than his bones.

They stand in row and greet the King and Queen and Ned hopes neither eyes wander to further back hopefully hidden out of sight.

He hugs Robert tight, prays friendship lasts forever and isn’t thrown away in a heartbeat.

(In the Red Keep there is a babe with his head torn open; Ned hasn’t seen him and hopes he never will.)

Ned rides south, leaves Jon with a dwarf and a black banner to which he’ll pledge his name. Still unknowing of how much Ned tells lies and how much Ned tells truth but maybe that’s for the best.

The Wall is the last station for land and for man both.

If they see each other again, Ned will be surprised.

(No one follows them from Winterfell but people die in all places; he meets new ones wherever he goes.)

King’s Landing stinks with its rot and decay. It rises in thick clouds of poisonous air, hiding the people beneath it and the stars above it.

The beauty of a dark night sky is a foreign thing, here, and Ned can’t sleep. Not the short one, at least.

He is Hand, and the last one died

(He walks here still.)

Ned deals every execution himself, the sentencing and the killing. It’s the only way he knows how, with a sword he isn’t meant to wield and a home he isn’t meant to hold.

Ned was always meant to be the executioner, the Second Son and the Spare. To kill in the Name of his King and his Lord, for Westeros and for the North. For All Land and People South of the Wall, Ned would cut down thousands.

But never children. He didn’t live to kill children.

(Kings Landing is crowded enough with them as it is.)

There is a book, people whispering in his ear and bastard children at every corner. Changing the course of history just by existing, in the North as in the South.

Ned Stark is a Hand like Jon Arryn was before him.

A fool.

(Jon stands close; doesn’t say a thing.)

Cat hunts South and captures the Brother of the Queen; the one she doesn’t like but no one cares when his hair is blond and one eye is green and weakness are forbidden all Lions.

Ned is in the dungeons.

The King is dead.

(Fat still and none the wiser, raging for a Lyanna that Ned can hear laughing from far, far away.)

In his cell it is dark and quiet but never lonely. People come and see him often, dead and living switching places as they please. Laughing at him, screaming at him, praying for him to come to his senses and lie for honor he can’t claim.

It’s surprisingly busy, being a prisoner; he thinks maybe even more than when he was Hand.

Ned still has time to regret.

(He’ll take secrets with him when he dies; too few and too many all at once.)

Ned stands on a stage, a puppet on a string with oily hair and tattered clothes and no food in his stomach. This is a show of performance, he knows; carefully planned by the Queen and her family, and they all have their parts to play.  Ned’s is to bend his neck and be the remorseful unwitting villain, Sansa his grieving and pleading daughter, the Queen a stoic beauty for all to lean on and the Young King a merciful tyrant that’ll send him to serve his Realm at the Wall instead of die worthlessly in the City of Waste.

Ned will not live. He knows it’s not only Dragon Kings who feed on Fire and Blood. Not only Dragon Kings who are Mad.

They cut off his head.

(The people roar.)

-

There are shadows walking in the halls of Winterfell. Hiding behind corners, following servants and lord folk alike. Sometimes their bodies are as sharp as the horizon when the sun is shining unhindered and sometimes they’re as murky as the depths of the Crypt during the dark hours.

None see them, no matter.

None but Ned.

(Ned sometimes takes the long way around and ends up late because they fill up the hall and walking through them is something that he did just the once and never, ever, again.)

 

**Author's Note:**

> my [tumblr](http://www.tockae.tumblr.com)  
> i do things there


End file.
